South to South across the Paciﬁc: Ernest E. Neal …sv121.wadax.ne.jp/~jaas-gr-jp/jjas/PDF/2005/No.16-181.pdfsolution to serious shortages of housing and manpower for housing in

The Japanese Journal of American Studies, No. 16 (2005)

South to South across the Pacific: Ernest E. Neal and Community Development Efforts

in the American South and the Philippines1

Satoshi NAKANO*

I

In the literature of America’s encounters with Asia, and vice versa,historians on the either shore of the Pacific have more or less habituallyused the term “across the Pacific” to connote human ventures headed fora very distant as well as different society, in reference to tragedies causedby mutual misunderstanding, ignorance, and distrust, and also to greatendeavors to overcome, understand, or tolerate such differences.2 Re-cently historians have certainly become more careful in discussing dis-tinctions between Western and non-Western people since the time thatSaid’s Orientalism3 and postcolonial studies made their impact on aca-demic communities, many having turned the spotlight on the cultural andsocial anatomy of differentiation, arguing that knowledge and powerhave become intertwined and discovering Asia as America’s distantother, and vice versa.

My concern here, however, is that such recent efforts to deconstructwith all the best intentions Orientalist notions of otherness only tend toreproduce or even strengthen the narrative of dualism, which might evennarrow and simplify the landscape of U.S.-Asia Pacific history, as such

*Professor, Hitotsubashi University

Copyright © 2005 Satoshi Nakano. All rights reserved. This work may be used,with this notice included, for noncommercial purposes. No copies of this workmay be distributed, electronically or otherwise, in whole or in part, withoutpermission from the author.

8-Satoshi Nakano(p181) 6/9 05.7.12 6:47 PM ページ 181

endeavors tend to portray people as preoccupied with finding othernessand difference in whatever and whomever they encounter across thePacific. Admittedly, the cultural politics of differentiation might be a use-ful concept for historians, especially if one focuses on the culture of im-perialism during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,4 butsuch is not always the case. In this article, I would like to present a casein which a person with particular “domestic” social experiences in theUnited States found himself surrounded by things familiar to him in suchdistant countries as India and the Philippines. Ernest E. Neal (1911–1972) was one of the first African American foreign aid officers to workfor the U.S. Agency for International Development (hereafter USAID)and devoted his life to social enterprises sponsored under the name of“community development” in various agrarian communities at home andabroad. Exploring his experiences may open our eyes to at least one alter-native way to explore transpacific experiences between peoples “acrossthe Pacific.”

II

During the 1950s and early 1960s, the “gospel of community develop-ment”5 or “an attempt to marry Western doctrines of behavior on to asomewhat romantic or idealized notion of Asian village society”6 spreadamong U.S. foreign-aid programs aimed at Asia’s developing countries,which were at that time considered new battlegrounds for America’sCold War to win the hearts and minds of local peoples. Ernest E. Nealwas an American recruited from the Deep South’s “Heart of Dixie” stateof Alabama to win this new kind of war against communism.

Before going into detail about Neal’s experiences, it might be helpfulto look back over the historical origins of community development (here-after CD); that is, its trends and practices as experienced in the UnitedStates. In terms of social enterprises geared to the problem of mass pover-ty, one source of CD was the settlement house movement, which origi-nated in Britain during the late nineteenth century and was then widelypopularized in the United States. Many present day CD enterprises havetheir historical foundations in the urban settlement houses movement atthe turn of the previous century. These ventures, however, were at thattime considered not so much a part of a social reform movement, butrather as educational opportunities for young men and women of afflu-ent families to mingle among the urban poor and discover how they lived,

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which amounted to nothing more than philanthropic ventures, by nomeans free from paternalistic as well as racist biases.7

On the other hand, the twentieth century notion of CD has been definedas a social enterprise for improving living conditions in local communi-ties, not as charity but through active participation and self-help on thepart of community members themselves. CD also appears more like asocial reform movement in its aspirations for change and the mobiliza-tion of local communities. It is, however, mostly local and national gov-ernments that initiate and organize CD ventures and it is also mostlyprofessionals coming from outside the communities in question thatexercise leadership over such ventures.8 The following United Nation’sdefinition of CD published in 1959 may well summarize such features.

Community Development means the process by which the efforts of the peo-ple themselves are united with those of governmental authorities to improvethe economic, social and cultural conditions of communities, . . . The dis-tinctive features of community development programmes are the participa-tion by the people themselves in efforts to improve their level of living withreliance as much as possible on their own initiative: and the provision of tech-nical and other services in ways which encourage initiative, self-help andmutual help and make them more effective.9

The concept underlying the above definition is “aided self-help,” amethod to encourage the recipients of government assistance to becomeas self-reliant as they could be, with technical and minimum materialassistance from the government, provided on the condition of maximumself-help exercised by the recipients. One of its conceptual origins is the“aided self-help housing” policy, which was conceived as a practicalsolution to serious shortages of housing and manpower for housing inEurope after World War I. The idea was developed and spread to manykinds of government projects, including those in the USSR and BritishIndia. In the United States, the Federal Housing Administration (FHA),which was established in 1934 as a part of the New Deal, launched amajor “aided self-help housing” project in 1939 for an urban slum reset-tlement project in Puerto Rico. After World War II, Jacob Crane, whohad been in charge of the Puerto Rico project, lobbied for the establish-ment of a housing and planning section at the United Nations. This even-tually led to the introduction of “aided self-help” into the broader arenaof United Nations’ development assistance programs.10

The concept was then incorporated into the basic doctrine of U.S.foreign development assistance as shown in John F. Kennedy’s 1961

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inaugural address, “to those peoples in the huts and villages across theglobe struggling to break the bonds of mass misery, we pledge our bestefforts to help them help themselves [italics added].”11 It is no wonderthat the concept became closely related to the presumed American tra-dition of self-respect, agrarian democracy and citizenry, while becom-ing extremely convenient for the Kennedy Administration in gainingCongressional support, as it could be used as a proof of the government’swillingness to restrain federal expenditures for foreign assistance. The1961 Foreign Assistance Act declared, “Assistance from the UnitedStates shall be used in support of, rather than substitution for, the self-help efforts that are essential to successful development programs andshall be concentrated in those countries that take positive steps to helpthemselves [italics added].”12 The Act was designed to integrate thenscattered federal agencies for foreign economic assistance, and estab-lished USAID.

While the “aided self-help” concept was adopted as the basic princi-ple of U.S. foreign development assistance, it was federal and local gov-ernment programs and efforts of “agricultural extension” that providedthe ways and means, as well as the personnel for related programs. Theorigin of agricultural extension also dates back to the late nineteenth cen-tury, when various rural reconstruction efforts were spreading aroundthe world in order to address the agrarian crisis brought about by theforces of capitalist industrialization and colonialism. In the UnitedStates, Congress enacted a series of laws to establish land-grant univer-sities, whose departments of agriculture and agricultural experimentalstations would work with federal, state, and local governments to im-prove productivity, farming methods, farm business management, etc.in the interest of local communities.13 During the New Deal years, theResettlement Administration was established in 1935 and then incorpo-rated into the Department of Agriculture in 1937 as the Farm SecurityAdministration (FSA), which further expanded agricultural extensionenterprises to help poor farmers and sharecroppers who had been dis-placed by the Great Depression and the structural transformation of theagrarian economy.14

The important thing for the present discussion is that in practice agri-cultural extension had to go beyond the mere improvement of farmingmethods, since programs inevitably had to face various interrelated prob-lems in CD, such as sanitation, health care, nutrition, and housing. Thiswas especially the case with the FSA farm resettlement project, in which

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displaced farmers and sharecroppers would be resettled on farms pur-chased by the FSA from landlords who wanted to sell them, as such ven-tures would entail building a new physical and social environment forthe resettled farmers. Those in charge of agricultural extension ventures,mainly land-grant university teachers and federal and state governmentemployees, thus became community work professionals of sorts, whohad to acquire skills and experience in working together with the localpeople to discover issues, think out their solutions, and communicate andnegotiate with outside government agencies to carry out their plans.“Community development” gradually came into use as a more appro-priate generic term for this sort of social work and rapidly spread afterWorld War II. Ernest Neal was one among such self-made CD profes-sionals of the New Deal years.

III

Ernest E. Neal was born in 1911 to a poor African-American farmfamily near Chattanooga, Tennessee. From his “narrative report of tech-nical assistance experiences,” we can see how strongly Neal’s entirecareer was influenced by the fact that he had spent his boyhood on a smallpoor farm, having personally experienced the pain and sorrow of “thewretched of the earth.”15 Neal himself, however, was competent and for-tunate enough to escape the misery, going on to Knoxville College (B.A.)and to the prestigious Fisk University, where he obtained a master’sdegree in sociology. Then he started a teaching career in 1939 at TexasCollege, a small black liberal arts teachers college in the city of Tyler.After initial failures to impress his students, he thought of using Tyler“as a sociological laboratory” to stimulate them. This led him to becomeinvolved in the city’s community projects, including building a publiclibrary and putting in street paving for the local black community, mark-ing his first involvement with anything related to CD. In 1946, he wentto teach at Bishop College in Marshall, Texas, where he joined the agri-cultural extension work going on at Sabine Farms, Texas’ only FSAresettlement project for black farmers, which had resettled some 120black families in 1937. The farms were de-federalized in 1946, andBishop College acquired a 19-acre center there, which included a com-munity center “as a laboratory for applied education,” as the successorto the federal agricultural extension project.16 Then in 1948, TuskegeeInstitute offered Neal the directorship of its Rural Life Council. The offer



from “the capstone of rural development in the South”17 showed howwidely Neal had become acknowledged as a rural CD specialist by then.

What Neal witnessed after his arrival in Alabama, however, was anongoing agricultural revolution in the South affecting the fate of the ruralblack population, which even the prestigious Tuskegee Institute couldnot control. Baldwin Farms, which had been granted to Booker T.Washington (1856–1915) to assist graduates of the Institute’s Agricul-tural Department in becoming successful farmers, had been mostly aban-doned before Neal’s first visit there. On Colonel McLemore’s 2,000-acrecotton plantation, which was located 20 miles west of Tuskegee, con-tinuing radical mechanization had forced 180 out of its original 200sharecropper families to leave by the time Neal first visited there. ThenMcLemore decided to change from mechanized cotton production tolivestock raising, reducing the number of black families living on hisplantation to only 5. The uprooted families all moved to the cities to com-pete for jobs, without much prospect of success.18

Such scenes are indicative of what was occurring all over the agrari-an states of the South on a tremendous scale: that is, the demise of thetraditional cotton plantation economy causing mass unemployment ofblack sharecroppers and their exodus to the cities, Southern as well asNorthern.19 Realizing that the situation was going to “get worse” and thatthe problem was not going to be solved by the Tuskegee Institute, Nealand his colleagues decided to pour their efforts into creating “nationalawareness of what the revolution was doing to black farmers” by testi-fying at Congressional hearings, organizing national seminars and con-ferences, and urging the national media to direct their attention to theproblem. A few articles did appear in the major newspapers of the timementioning Neal as a spokesperson for Southern black farmers and urg-ing the nation to address the problem of the agricultural revolution andthe mass evacuation of black farmers to the cities as unskilled, low-paidworkers.20

Apart from national awareness-raising activities, Neal thought it wasequally important to take care of the old people and small children whowould remain on subsistence farms after the working-age people left forthe cities. The Rural Life Council initiated a project to select a few smallsubsistence farm communities on an experimental basis to study waysof improving their living conditions. It was at this point that Neal andTuskegee put the “aided self-help” concept into full swing, especiallytargeting low-cost housing and backyard equipment, teaching local peo-

186 SATOSHI NAKANO


ple how to make concrete blocks and lay them for housing and how tocultivate better gardens. They organized community councils to find outwhat the real problems were in each community and to sort out the waysin which the Tuskegee Institute could help them. They also sent a cul-tural anthropologist to live in one community to study customs relatedto health care, promoted cultivating gardens year-round for better nutri-tion, and worked with home economists, vocational agricultural econo-mists, and church ministers to meet the needs of local communities.

Notwithstanding their efforts, which certainly improved “the moraleif not the economics” of rural communities, Neal dispassionately recallsin his memoirs that “The impersonal laws of agronomy and economicsare stronger than the magic of the greatest charismatic leaders or well-intentioned reformers.”21 The problem could only have been solved if ithad gained national attention, thus providing huge federal governmentresources. Such was not the case. The ventures initiated by Neal and hiscolleagues amount to only a few drops in the bucket. One could even saythat “aided self-help” for the black subsistence farmers contributed notso much to the eradication of their poverty as their adaptation to it. Nealknew these limitations too well to believe in “the magic,” which couldmake the life of local communities “a little better” but could neverchange it. Neal then believed, “the work had a better chance for success”in CD enterprises in India and the Philippines, “because it was supportedby the governments of the both countries and the United States.”22

IV

Neal does not explain in his memoirs the exact reasons why he decidedto pursue a new career as a foreign aid officer; however, it was inevitablethat the agricultural revolution occurring in the South would radicallyreduce its rural black population, the very objects of CD, and that sooneror later CD professionals would have to find new arenas of activity. Rap-idly expanding urban black communities could certainly have been oneof those arenas. Another opportunity was development aid, which wasjust starting up when Neal was at Tuskegee. He became more and moreinterested in the latter option, since he believed that “The acceptance ofNegroes as full citizens is dependent upon their ability to become theproponents of a cause bigger than themselves,”23 and hoped that“American Negroes” would point “the way to underprivileged people allover the world, as to how they can lift themselves up.”24 In other words,



he believed African Americans should go beyond their own “internal”issues and become role models for peoples of the developing world inorder to prove they were worthy of the full-fledged U.S. citizenship thathad been denied to them so long.

Neal might also have been influenced and encouraged in his decisionto switch careers by his colleagues. Jacob Crane, a proponent of “aidedself-help housing,” had sent a few people from developing countries toTuskegee Institute to see the “small” rural experiments then led byNeal;25 and Neal’s long time colleague Arthur F. Raper, a prominentsociologist known for his brave and pioneering criticism of lynching,sharecropping and tenancy in the South, became involved in rural devel-opment problems on a global scale after he visited Japan in 1947 at theinvitation of SCAP (Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers) tostudy agrarian reform there. Raper helped Neal get security clearance asa government employee, for which the latter expressed his gratitude inhis memoir, saying, “Without Arthur’s help for security clearance dur-ing the era of Senator Joseph McCarthy, there would have been no for-eign aid career for me.”26

In February 1954, Neal was appointed director of community devel-opment for the U.S. Technical Assistance Mission to India. By then CDhad become one of the most highlighted fields in U.S. foreign develop-ment assistance programs.27 It was then considered the most effective,visible, as well as “cheap” countermeasure against the threat of com-munist revolution in the developing countries, and it was hoped that itwould prove effective in reforming “feudal” agrarian societies throughsuch western democratic processes as participation, self-help, and mutu-al help, not through the collectivist means propagated by the socialistblocs. It was also expected to be a wildcard for increased food produc-tion and general improvement of living conditions in rural societies.

India was the first recipient country of U.S. aid for CD, initiated in1952. Mostly because it was at odds with the U.S. over non-alliancediplomacy, India was considered one of the most important targets ofU.S. aid, while CD was considered an ideal field in which the two coun-tries could work together, away from any discord in international affairs.Two joint objectives were set: to achieve increases in food productionand to implement social reform based on the principle of citizen partic-ipation and democracy. Then several pilot villages were selected where“panchayats (village councils)” were set up. One village level aid work-er with 18 months training was assigned to live in each village. The pro-

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gram was soon expanded and eventually spread to all the villages in Indiaby the mid-1960s.28 Though the U.S. aid mission sent a few Americanspecialists to reside in rural India as agricultural supervisors, the projectas a whole was carried out through the initiative and manpower of theIndian government, while the U.S. mission provided such material assis-tance as jeeps, farm equipment, educational materials for agriculturalschools, medical equipment and drugs for health care centers.

Though impressed with the huge scale and enthusiasm of the overallCD endeavors in India, Neal came to notice during 3 months of inten-sive traveling around rural India that the village people were workingharder on schools, health centers, and community wells than on “hardeconomic problems,” because they did not own the land they cultivated.He also found “untouchables” were for the most part not included incommunity-wide projects. These things reminded him of the early daysof rural development sponsored by Tuskegee.

Community Projects tended to be projects that did not upset traditional waysbut were concentrated on building schools, community centers, and com-munity wells. The problem posed by the exploitative moneylenders, tenancy,marketing, and agricultural productivity, resisted the efforts of communitydevelopment. These were national problems that could not be solved by vil-lage-level workers.29

This observation expressed in his memoir probably reflects after-thoughts about CD from later years. During the mid 1950s, CD was stilla shining mantra spreading to all the developing countries. India offereda huge training ground for U.S. foreign aid officers, who fanned outacross the globe from South Asia. In 1956, Neal was assigned to thePhilippines, where CD enterprises flourished as a strange by-product ofthe Cold War.

V

While U.S. aid to CD in India was welcomed due to its relative inde-pendence from the distance between the two countries over internation-al politics, CD programs in the Philippines were from the very beginningopenly declared part of the allied “warfare” against communist insur-gency. Behind the aid was the compound shadow of the Huk rebellion,which had originated out of the leftist peasant movement that had begunin the 1930s in the breadbasket provinces of Central Luzon, and a bloodyelection fraud crisis that was badly damaging the legitimacy of Elpidio



Quirino’s presidency and the Liberal Party government with claims ofcorruption and financial mismanagement.

The U.S. government responded to these problems in the midst ofAsia’s Cold War by strengthening military assistance to suppress theHuk insurgency, while clandestinely staging a drama to oust the un-popular Quirino in favor of “the guy,” Ramon Magsaysay, and theNacionalista Party in the name of “free and honest” elections. Oneimportant means to this latter end was the National Movement for FreeElections (hereafter NAMFREL), which was established in August 1951with Gabriel L. Kaplan, an election law expert and experienced civicorganizer from New York City, as the organization’s de facto chief advi-sor. The organization was financed by the CIA and Kaplan himself laterturned out to be a CIA agent, although he was more of an organizer whoused the CIA as a cover for his aspirations to organize civic movementsregardless of their whereabouts.30

Kaplan initiated CD programs in the Philippines in a rather peculiarway by using NAMFREL as the base organization. Having securedfinancial support from U.S. based companies, NAMFREL started tobuild Philippine Community Centers, the first two being inaugurated inFebruary 1953 in Mabalacat, Pampanga Province, which was at the heartof the Huk rebellion, and in Marbel, Cotabato Province on Mindanao.Kaplan declared that these centers were “not established with the ideaof fighting communism, but rather to eradicate the conditions underwhich communism thrives, namely poverty, ill health, ignorance andlack of opportunity for citizen participation in community affairs.”31

Eight more NAMFREL Community Centers were to be inaugurated by1956, when the Philippine government took over CD enterprises fromNAMFREL. Chino Roces, a respected journalist and the owner of theManila Times, worked closely with Kaplan and promoted CD projectsin his newspapers “as if it had been a major social reform movement.”32

Ramon Binamira (1927–2004), the young NAMFREL director ofCebu City who had been discovered as a talented young law student byKaplan in 1951, was made director of NAMFREL CD enterprises 2 yearslater. In 1956 Binamira was appointed by President Magsaysay to thenewly created cabinet post of Presidential Assistant of CommunityDevelopment (hereafter PACD) and thereafter led the Philippine CDenterprises during their pioneer days until 1961. Though Binamira him-self rejected a contract offer with the CIA, it could not have been possi-ble for him to exercise leadership over the CD projects without both open

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and covert assistance from Kaplan and various U.S. agencies, as he hadto face a serious challenge from the Philippines Rural ReconstructionMovement under the leadership of Y. C. James Yen, an internationallyacknowledged figure in the field, and Secretary of Agriculture SalvadorAraneta, one of the most respected senior intellectuals and politicians inthe Philippines, who wanted to gain control of rural development pro-jects supported by U.S. aid. Only with the eleventh-hour strong en-dorsement for Binamira’s plan from the U.S. Embassy and foreign aidagencies did Magsaysay withdraw his support for Yen and Araneta andadopt Binamira’s 5-year national plan for community development,establishing PACD in April 1956.33 4 months later, Earnest Neal arrivedin the Philippines as the chief advisor to PACD and special assistant forrural development to the director of United States Operations Missions(USOM) in the Philippines.34

VI

Upon his arrival in the Philippines, Neal found that the PACD officeconsisted of Binamira and “six other bright young lawyers” alreadyfeverishly working on drafting the organization program to implementcommunity development. An essential part of the program was training,which was to produce “multi-purpose” CD workers (hereafter PACDworkers) who would live in rural communities, and plan and carry outthe grants-in-aid programs to be supported by the government. Thoughtheir role was essentially similar to that of village-level workers in India,the Filipino trainees were required to be college graduates and wereselected through a special civil service examination and interview proc-ess, with an only 8% pass rate. Coming from such fields as agronomy,sociology, social welfare, public sanitation, civil engineering, and edu-cation, they would receive training for 6 months without pay at the brand-new community development training facility at the University of thePhilippines Los Baños, which had been granted by U.S. aid. After grad-uation, they would be assigned to barrios (i.e., rural villages) where theywould live with the local people as “a stimulator and organizer of self-help barrio activities, an aide and a connecting link between the barriopeople and the government.” The “aided self-help” concept was in-corporated into the PACD grants-in-aid programs in the following way.The barrios applying for the grants should offer locally available humanand material resources as much as they could, while the government



would provide such materials and equipment as cement and motorcy-cles, so that the burden would be shared “fifty-fifty” between the two.Cash grants were firmly rejected.35

The PACD enterprise thus started in late 1956 with the first 320 grad-uates from the CD training facility, 90% of whom had worked as teach-ers, lawyers and government employees before joining PACD. As morenew graduates were hired, PACD expanded its personnel to 1,200 mem-bers by 1959, taking care of more than 6,000 barrios (out of some 20,000barrios in the country) and 21,000 grants-in-aid programs, while spon-soring short-term leadership training programs around the country formore than 26,000 barrio leaders.36 The total cash worth of the “self-help”projects came to almost 26 million pesos (13 million dollars) by 1959,53% of which was presumably borne by the local barrio communities.Nearly one third (8,460 thousand pesos) of the total expense was direct-ed to the construction of “barrio self-help roads,” which were extendedto 1,316 km, followed by 2,350 thousand pesos to 417 irrigation pro-jects. Other major projects included 10,000 hectares of forestation, pestextermination campaigns, the distribution of seed, seedlings and fertil-izer, and the construction of community centers.37 To evaluate theprograms, the University of the Philippines was funded to establish acommunity development research and evaluation council to act as anindependent third party.38

Manila Times reports about PACD projects, which may have beenexaggerated due to Chino Roces’ collaboration with Kaplan, tell of anenthusiasm to the point of evangelism during the early years over thework being done. The keyword in the reporting was always “self-help.”One of the first PACD trainees stated:

[B]e it in the mountain fastness of northern Luzon or in the wilderness ofMindanao, we will be writing history. Of course, the success of our missiondepends on us—and their resistance to our crusade: Self-Help.39

“Crusade for self-help” in their terminology meant an effort to make bar-rio people realize “they cannot be totally dependent upon the govern-ment” and “if they want their community to be progressive, the initiativemust come from them.”40 Once they could stimulate the communitiesinto helping themselves, “the rest of the job would be comparativelysmooth.”41 For example, on Bohol island, the Manila Times reported,“Prodded on only by technical advice and occasional grants-in-aid, theyhave realized that they can do so many things if they only pool their

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efforts to solve common problems,” putting up health centers and com-munity centers.42

Neal apparently felt much more comfortable in the Philippines, where“a harmonious and productive team”43 could develop before long, thanin India, which he felt was “not an easy country” for a technical advisor,because the Indian elite of the civil service were educated in England,were “perfectly competent,” and were thus too proud to be enthusiasticabout foreign technical assistance.44 After all, Neal was working forsomething he could not even have dreamt of in the American South, eventhough it might have been made possible as a part of “psychological war-fare” against communism. The PACD enterprises were far and awaylarger in scale and gained far more national attention than the Tuskegeerural development programs. No wonder, he thought, that “the work hada better chance for success” abroad than in his homeland.

VII

The initial euphoria, however, soon gave way to reality, and Nealeventually came to doubt the very notion of CD, which had become “anarticle of faith” in the rural development aid programs carried on by theUnited Nations and the United States. The first blow came in the planecrash in March 1957 that killed President Magsaysay, whose platformhad been deeply committed to the cause of rural development and onwhose popularity the PACD enterprises had so much relied. PACD nev-ertheless continued to operate, and Ramon Binamira, who was from thesame Bohol province as succeeding President Carlos P. Garcia, stayedas its head.

What triggered Neal’s doubts was Garcia’s decision not to supportadditional funding to increase the number of PACD workers, whichmade it impossible to extend the projects to all the 20,000 barrios aroundthe country. Neal recalls that this presidential decision “forced some-thing to the forefront of my mind that I had pushed into the backgroundover the past three years.” It was the very necessity of a national gov-ernment agency with personnel extending to the village level that Nealdoubted. Having known that rural schoolteachers, rural public healthnurses and ministers in Texas and Alabama were doing almost the samekind of work that the CD workers were doing in India and the Philippines,he wondered if it was really desirable for professionals from the outsideto be in charge of self-help projects. Then Neal and the American staff



drafted a “think paper” proposing to pull all the PACD workers out ofthe barrios and place them in municipalities and provinces as aides tothe governors and mayors and as training officers for local public ser-vants and elected officials working with barrio people. Binamira strong-ly opposed the proposal, so Neal had to drop the idea.45

Though Neal touches upon the difference of opinion only casually inhis memoir, the argument was serious enough to question the founda-tion of CD and its “aided self-help” concept. While Neal thought PACDshould cover all the barrios around the country, Binamira argued theyshould limit the recipients of the grants-in-aid only within communitieswhere “aided self-help” could be productive. This meant that the grants-in-aid would go to only those “relatively resourceful barrios” that couldmeet the conditions under the “fifty-fifty” principle, while “the poorestof the poor” would be excluded from being recipients of this particularprogram. Binamira thought the poorest communities should be givenrelief in other ways. Binamira strongly disagreed with Neal’s proposalto pull PACD workers out of barrios, because he believed the mostimportant mission of PACD workers was to go deep into the barrio com-munities and directly initiate the people into the spirit of self-help andparticipation.46

It was quite understandable for Binamira, who was in charge of sucha huge national project, to insist on the “fifty-fifty” principle in order tosecure tangible results. This, however, meant that CD would amount tonothing more than helping those who could help themselves, which is afar cry from the social revolution it was being advertised as. One couldeven say that the “fifty-fifty” formula functioned to help minimize theamount of public resources earmarked for stabilizing a discontented ruralsociety, enabling the government to use more public funds for state-building in the form of industrialization and urban infrastructures. Thisis exactly what happened during the years of martial law regime(1972–1986) of President Ferdinand E. Marcos, whose development pol-icy was severely criticized for its neglect of rural social improvement bythe United Nation’s research and recommendations on rural develop-ment published in 1985.47

Binamira’s assertion concerning the necessity for professionallytrained CD workers to be assigned directly to the barrio communitieswas overwhelmingly more popular among CD advocates at the time thanNeal’s counter-assertion that multi-purpose CD works could be borneby local leaders. We cannot, however, ignore the fact that the former

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could very likely result in portraying aid recipients as dependent andproblematic others, since CD workers could only go into CD-earmarkedcommunities after presuming local people’s ignorance and lack of under-standing about, and even possible opposition to, the notion of self-help,as shown in the words of the PACD trainee quote above, who was brac-ing himself for “resistance to our crusade.” Within this formula, PACDprojects, which were originally designed to try and create self-help atti-tudes and participatory democracy among the people, could very wellturn into activities perpetuating the preconception of the poor as depen-dent and selfish.

VIII

Despite his disagreement with Binamira, Neal was entitled to be happyabout what he had achieved in the Philippines when he left in 1958 forhis new assignment in Africa. At that time, however, the PACD projectswere already losing the momentum they had enjoyed during the earlydays. Several PACD workers were even charged with corruption andsuspended during the election year of 1961.48 Binamira himself wascharged with collusion between his family business and PACD enter-prises.49 After he tendered his resignation following Garcia’s defeat byDiosdado Macapagal in November 1961, the General Auditing Officediscovered a 1,240,000 pesos loss incurred by PACD as the result ofoverpricing supplies.50 These incidents were definite signs that PACDprojects were already sinking into the greed of the special interest poli-tics of the country. The office of PACD continued on, however, and cameunder the directorship of Ernest Maceda in 1965, soon after FerdinandMarcos was sworn into office. From that time on PACD was deftly incor-porated by the two into the Marcos political machine, to the chagrin ofits founder, Binamira.51

In August 1964 Ernest Neal returned to the Philippines from hisassignments in Liberia and Sierra Leone, this time as deputy director ofthe USAID Mission there. Neal recalls, “I had the feeling that I had neverleft the Philippines,” since he was hearing the same problems and solu-tions being discussed and proposed that had been current 8 years previ-ous. The rural development problem seemed not to have change oneiota.52

Around the same time, the U.S. international policy focus on CD hadrapidly begun to fade. By 1963 USAID had withdrawn its support from



India’s CD programs, and the CD Division in USAID itself was liqui-dated.53 It was not only in the United States that the concept of CD wasbeing diagnosed as faulty, for in India, as well, an influential governmentresearch report published as early as in 1957 had already pointed out thatCD programs had been diverted into officially controlled “bricks andmortar” public works programs “devoid of almost any popular dynam-ic.”54 British scholar Hugh Tinker, in a 1960 comparative study of CDprograms in Southeast Asia, pointed out the existence of “strange dishar-monies between theory and practice” in Thailand and the Philippines,while in Malaya the entire theory of self-help and participation had beenabandoned in favor of a mixed state-private sector policy to raise incomelevels.55

It was the “Green Revolution” that, of course, quickly replaced thegospel of self-help during the late 1960s under the Lyndon B. Johnsonadministration, as the spotlight was again back on the Philippines as thehost of the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), which devel-oped the first “high yielding varieties” of IR-8, now a “laboratory,”instead of a battleground, to prove the triumph of western democracy,this time through science and technology and free market economy.56 Asdeputy director of the USAID Mission, Neal became a significant by-player in the Philippine version of the Green Revolution. Neal confessedin his memoir, however, that his involvement in the Green Revolutionwas rather a passive one:

I was convinced that there was little, if anything, the Mission could do forthe urban unemployment or the subsistence farmers. It was not that my inter-est in and concern about these people had lessened; I just did not know whatthe Mission could do about these problems. Therefore, I concentrated on thesector of the agricultural economy that offered the best potential – the irri-gated rice growing areas.57

The Mission concentrated its efforts on two provinces, Laguna andPampanga, in the vicinity of Manila, with relatively high rice produc-tivity potentials, in much the same way as Binamira’s PACD had insist-ed on limiting grants to the more resourceful barrios previously. InPampanga, the very ambitious young governor by the name BenignoAquino, Jr. went crazy over the Green Revolution and threw his fullsupport behind the Mission, effectively mobilizing the province in themanner of a true revolutionary army general.58 During Neal’s secondassignment, the Philippines achieved dramatic increases in rice produc-tion, which lead to fulfillment of the long cherished dream of self-suffi-

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ciency (albeit only temporary), and it even became a rice-exportingcountry (albeit symbolically).59

The Green Revolution, however, was not the panacea it was portrayedas in terms of solving rural development problems in the Philippines.While it achieved a long-awaited improvement in low rice productivity,it came under criticism as having no advantage for farmers, who had tobear new expenses for the seed, irrigation facility maintenance, andmechanized equipment necessary for “high yield” rice.60 Neal adds:

Under the more efficient system of cultivation, the little security that the land-less laborers had was taken away. I was learning how delicate the balance isin an agricultural area where most of the people are poor and under-employedand the social consequences when this balance is upset.61

What Neal “was learning” reminds one of the experiences of black farm-ers in the American South, where their rural problems were ultimatelysolved not by reform, but by the dissolution of their communities. SabineFarms, for African American farming families in eastern Texas, whichonce had been a bastion of the civil rights movement, is today a com-pletely deserted village, with only the remnants remaining.62 This reali-ty is certainly different, but not all that far from what the Philippinesociety faces today, a vast rural population with nearly one-tenth of thenational population seeking jobs overseas.63

IX

After completing his second assignment in the Philippines, Neal wasagain assigned to Africa in 1969 as a regional population officer stationedin Acca, Ghana. There, however, he contracted amyotrophic lateral scle-rosis (commonly known as Lou Gehrig’s disease). When he discoveredhis life was quickly drawing to an end, he decided to concentrate on writ-ing his “narrative report” as his last assignment for USAID. In the mem-oir, in which he strictly limited the topics to his public life, Neal doesnot disclose any thoughts about his daughter Kathleen, who at the timewas pursuing life as a black revolutionary,64 in sharp contrast to his lifedevoted to more modest social enterprises. We can gather from his wordsin the memoir that he might, however, not have been all that bittertowards his daughter, as he frankly questioned the basic concept of CDwhile humbly admitting the rather futile efforts he and his colleagueshad made to improve “the quality of life of the people in traditional soci-eties.”65 The memoir is indeed a rare document, giving us many clues to



the similarities and interactions between social work in the AmericanSouth and U.S. aid to developing countries.

During his entire career, Neal strove to help “subsistence farmers,”who were “displaced people” muscled out during the restructuringprocess of agrarian society under capitalist industrialization and socioe-conomic modernization. While he applauded people with skill and com-petence, who would be able to solve their problems themselves bygetting out of the poor villages of their birth, headed for the industrial-ized cities or commercial farming, his own life would be concerned with“the wretched,” unable to leave their home villages, forced to derive alivelihood from local “traditional economies.” His basic theory of com-munity development was that rural people could solve their economicproblems through “aided self-help.” Having striven for decades to helpthem help themselves, however, Neal discovered the concept to be “toosimplistic to cope with the magnitude and complexity” of village soci-ety under all the varieties of pressure to modernize.66 What Neal foundtime and again in his experiences in the American South, India, and thePhilippines was a pattern in which CD projects became concentrated oncommunity roads, buildings, wells and irrigation, thus leaving the morebasic economic problems intact.

Why did such projects continue to follow such a similar pattern fromthe Heart of Dixie all the way across the Pacific Ocean? Firstly, the CDconcept itself assumed the village as a viable economic unit, which couldbecome self-sufficient by means of aided self-help activities on the partof “the subsistence farmers,” but the modern rural village in fact was notthe Robinson Crusoe’s island it was presumed to be, and was not, norever could be, completely isolated from outside industrialized commer-cial sectors.

Secondly, the so-called “subsistence” families living in rural commu-nities were already self-supportive in the various ways available to them,living on limited resources whether located within or outside the com-munity. The basic formula of CD, “aided self-help,” would becomeattractive to them not because it would instruct them in ways to helpthemselves, since they already presumed they knew pretty well how todo that, but because they could draw on outside resources, which theychose to access by accommodating CD missionaries preaching the bibleof self-help. Neal stresses that CD in developing countries, despite itsfailure to underpin economic development programs, had some merit ingaining the “allegiance of the villagers to the new independent govern-ments.”67 If one may paraphrase, through CD rural society found that it

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could become dependent on the state in exchange for not rising up inrevolt. If this is what we can draw from Neal’s statement, it would seemthen that CD is attractive only as long as its recipients are able to dependon it; in other words, CD will remain as long as it continues to betraythe notion of self-help.

Thirdly and most importantly, CD was not designed to directly addressthe basic economic problems accounting for rural poverty, such as ten-ancy, usurious farm credit, and marketing. Though it is too simplistic toargue that the kind of postwar land reform implemented in Japan couldhave been carried out successfully in India or the Philippines, the failureof genuine and timely land reform certainly carried on being an impor-tant cause of continued mass poverty in their rural societies and manymore in the developing countries. Saying this, one is also reminded that,ironically enough, with respect to the southern regions of the very coun-try that made CD such a crucial part of its postwar determination to de-communize and democratize the rest of the world, that country’s federalgovernment refused to allow Earnest Neal’s colleague, Arthur Raper, towork for land redistribution in favor of African American cultivators,despite assigning him to the task of land reform programs around theworld.68

In the 1960s, the CD “movement” was re-imported into “the War onPoverty” in America’s urban slums, especially those of racial minorities,with its non-institutional approach and utopian notion of self-help intact.These notions and approaches were then exported to U.S. foreign devel-opment assistance programs during the 1970s. Then, as one would ex-pect, criticism concerning CD soon followed. As early as the mid-1970s,one sociologist published a critical analysis of New York City’s CDactivities directed at its poor youth regarding their “professionalizationof reform,” stating, “What develops is an ‘institutionalized revolution’primarily aiming at diverting public attention from immediate socialproblems and pacifying dissidents.”69 The same criticism continues tobe heard today with respect to urban CD movements, which “cannot pos-sibly radically transform distressed neighborhoods” and “is helpless inface of the powerful economic, political, and social forces that continu-ally reproduce distressed communities and their colored and poor whitepopulations.”70 Thus, it may well be said that the gospel of self-help, andthe subsequent backlash over the veracity of the doctrine has been goingback and forth across the Pacific, like ripples in a pond or an echo throughthe hills throughout the era of the welfare state Pax Americana-style.

What is lacking, whether intentionally or not, in Ernest Neal’s



memoirs are all of the paternalistic instincts and irritations, which occu-pied the minds of so many foreign aid officials at the time. In the sober-ness and calmness with which Neal reflects upon his failures andhelplessness, one finds both the depths of despair as well as a ray of hopeor two, which could only be uttered by a man who had experienced painand sorrow under colonial situations existing on both sides of the Pacific.

NOTES

1 An earlier version of this article in Japanese was published as Nakano Satoshi,“Karera no Jijo wo Tasukeru Tameni [To Help Them Help Themselves],” in Endo Yasuoand Yui Daizaburo, eds., Henbo suru Amerika Taiheiyou Sekai [Changing World ofAmerica and the Pacific], Vol. 1, (Sai’ryusha, 2004), 109–131.

2 Such usage of the term “across the Pacific” can be found in numerous book titlesincluding the following: Akira Iriye, Across the Pacific: An Inner History of American-East Asian Relations (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1967); Kang Liao, PearlS. Buck: A Cultural Bridge Across the Pacific (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press,1997); William R. Nester, Power Across the Pacific: A Diplomatic History of AmericanRelations With Japan (New York: New York University Press, 1996).

3 Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978).4 See Vicente L. Rafael, White Love and Other Events in Filipino History (Durham:

Duke University Press, 2000); Amy Kaplan, The Anarchy of Empire in the Making ofU.S. Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002); Yoshihara Mari, Embracingthe East: White Women and American Orientalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press,2002).

5 “Rural Workers Quit Soft Jobs, Take to Hard and Simple Life,” Manila Times, 24October 1956.

6 Hugh Tinker, “Community Development: A New Philosopher’s Stone?” Inter-national Affairs 37, Issue 3 (July 1961): 322.

7 Judith Ann Trolander, Professionalism and Social Change: From the SettlementHouse Movement to Neighborhood Centers, 1886 to Present (New York: Columbia Uni-versity Press, 1987).

8 John B. Hawley, “The Professional Status of Community Development in the UnitedStates,” Community Development Journal 4, No.3 (July 1969): 124–132; ClydeMitchell-Weaver, “Community Development in North America: Survey and Prospectfor the 1990s,” Community Development Journal 25, No.4 (October 1990): 345–355.

9 Tinker, “Community Development,” 309.10 Richard Harris, “The Silence of the Experts: ‘Aided Self-Help Housing’ 1939–

1954,” Habitat International 22, No.2 (1998): 165–189.11 John F. Kennedy, “Inaugural Address,” January 20, 1961.12 The Foreign Assistance Act of 1961, Public law 87–195 [S.1983], 75 Stat. 424,

approved September 4, 1961, Sec. 2151–1.13 Gwyn E. Jones & Chris Garforth, “The History, Development, and Future of

Agricultural Extension,” Burton E. Swanson, et. al., eds., Improving AgriculturalExtension. A Reference Manual (Rome: FAO/UN, 1997).

14 Kubo Fumiaki, New Deal to America Mishusei [New Deal and American De-mocracy] (Tokyo Daigaku Shuppankai, 1988).

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15 Ernest E. Neal, The Hope for the Wretched: A Narrative Report of TechnicalAssistance Experiences (Washington, D.C.: Agency for International Development,1972), 1.

16 Ibid., 11.17 Ibid., 17.18 Ibid., 18–22.19 Fujioka Jun, America Nanbu no Henbo [The Transformation of American South]

(Aoki Shoten, 1985).20 “Brannan Asks Social Security for Farms”; Washington Post, 6 December 1949;

“South Acts to Aid the Negro Farmer: Conference on Rural Life at Tuskegee UrgesGreater Acreage and Training.” New York Times, 21 June 1950.

21 Neal, The Hope for the Wretched, 27.22 Ibid., 122.23 Ernest Neal, “A Positive Approach to Race Relations in the South,” Social Forces

26, No.4 (May 1948): 467.24 Ernest Neal, “Two Negro Problems Instead of One: A Challenge to Negro Colleges,”

The Journal of Negro Education 21, No.2 (Spring 1952): 166.25 Harris, “Silence,” 12.26 Neal, The Hope for the Wretched, ix.27 Louis Miniclier, “Community Development as a Vehicle of U.S. Foreign Aid,”

Community Development Journal 4, No.1 (January 1969): 8.28 Garvin Karunaratne, “The Failure of the Community Development Programme in

India,” Community Development Journal 11, No.2 (April 1976): 95.29 Neal, The Hope for the Wretched, 38.30 Nakano Satoshi, “Gabriel L. Kaplan and U.S. Involvement in Philippine Electoral

Democracy: A Tale of Two Democracies,” Philippine Studies (Ateneo de ManilaUniversity Press) 52, No.2 (2004), 149–178.

31 “NAMFREL officials name sub-leaders,” Manila Times, 4 February 1953.32 Ramon Binamira, interview with the author, Cebu City, Philippines, September 6,

2003.33 Jose V. Abueva, Focus on the Barrio: The Story behind the Birth of the Philippine

Community Development Program under President Ramon Magsaysay (Manila: Uni-versity of the Philippines, 1959), 300–383.

34 Neal, The Hope for the Wretched, 43.35 “Community Development Workers,” Manila Times, 31 May 1957.36 Ramon P. Binamira, “It Has Taken Root: Program Successful, Says Reply from

PACD,” Manila Times, 25 December 1959.37 Ramon P. Binamira, “Rural Progress Reviewed,” Manila Times, 29 December 1959.38 Neal, The Hope for the Wretched, 47–48.39 “Rural workers quit soft jobs, take to hard and simple life,” Manila Times, 24

October 1956.40 “Community Development Workers,” Manila Times, 31 May 1957.41 “173 More Shoulders Ready for Rural Uplift’s Wheels,” Manila Times, 23 July

1957.42 “Cebu and Self-help: Barrio Folk Discovering the Pleasures of Doing it Alone,”

Manila Times, 24 June 1957.43 Neal, The Hope for the Wretched, 44.44 Ibid., 39.45 Ibid., 52.46 Binamira, interview with the author.



47 R. P. Misra, Rural Development: Capitalist and Socialist Paths, Volume One: Over-view (United Nations Centre for Regional Development, 1985), 65.

48 “2 PACD Brass Suspended,” Daily Mirror, 15 December 1961.49 Roland Villacorte, “Reply to Binamira,” Evening News, 11 January 1962.50 “GAO bares P1-M loss at PACD,” Manila Times, 8 January 1962.51 Binamira, interview with the author.52 Neal, The Hope for the Wretched, 81.53 Miniclier, “Community Development as a Vehicle,” 10–11.54 Hugh Tinker, “Authority and Community in Village India,” Journal of African

Administration 12, No.4 (October 1960): 201.55 Tinker, “Community Development,” 322.56 Nick Cullather, “Miracles of Modernization: The Green Revolution and Apotheosis

of Technology,” Diplomatic History 28, No.2 (April 2004): 227–254.57 Neal, The Hope for the Wretched, 125.58 Robert Shaplen, “Letter from Manila,” New Yorker, 15 January 1966: 100–102.59 Neal, The Hope for the Wretched, 81–100.60 Umehara Hiromitsu, “Firipin ni okeru ‘Midori no Kakumei’ to Nomin [The Green

Revolution and Peasants in the Philippines].” Ajia Keizai 19, No.9 (September 1978):26–40.

61 Neal, The Hope for the Wretched, 125.62 “Sabine Farms Left Its Mark in Harrison County,” Marshall News Messenger, 31

August 2002.63 Commission on Filipinos Overseas, Handbook for Filipinos Overseas: Fifth Edition

(Manila, 2000), 21.64 Neal’s daughter Kathleen, who had been in the Philippines with him during his first

assignment as a grade school girl, grew up to become a radical black power studentactivist in the United States. She dropped out of college and joined the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in 1966. Then she met Eldridge Cleaver of theBlack Panther Party in 1967 and married him the same year, bringing her to nationalattention as the only female executive of the most radical black revolutionary party atthe time. The Cleavers even had to live “in exile” in Algeria, North Korea and in Franceafter Eldridge’s shootout with police in 1968, though Kathleen with two children re-turned to the United States for a few months before Neal’s death in January 1972 (TheCleavers finally returned to the United States in 1975). Jessie Carney Smith, ed., NotableBlack American Women, Book II (Detroit: Gale Research, 1995), 101–103. KathleenNeal Cleaver, Interview with the author, New Haven, Conn., November 16, 2003.

65 Neal, The Hope for the Wretched, 122, 126.66 Ibid., 122.67 Ibid., 123.68 Akimoto Ei’ichi, New Deal to America Shihon Shugi [New Deal and the American

Capitalism] (Tokyo Daigaku Shuppankai, 1989), 404.69 Joseph Helfgot, “Professional Reform Organization and the Symbolic Represen-

tation of the Poor,” American Sociological Review 39, No.4 (August 1974): 490.70 Henry Louis Taylor Jr., “Building a Bridge between Community Development and

School Reform.” July 19, 2004. [http://uumin.org/Taylor-2002.htm (September 3,2004)].

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Documents

South to South across the Paciﬁc: Ernest E. Neal …sv121.wadax.ne.jp/~jaas-gr-jp/jjas/PDF/2005/No.16-181.pdfsolution to serious shortages of housing and manpower for housing in